Marco Arment: "Everyone should play by the same rules. A proposal: storage capacities referenced or implied in the names or advertisements for personal computers, tablets, and smartphones should not exceed the amount of space available for end-user installation of third-party applications and data, after enough software has been installed to enable all commonly advertised functionality. With today's OSes, iPads could advertise capacities no larger than 12, 28, 60, and 124 GB and the Surface Pros could be named 23 and 83 GB." Wholly agreed. When I buy a box of 100 staples, I expect it to contain ~100 staples - not 50 because the other 50 are holding the box together.

The "xiB" nomenclature was invented by HDD manufacturers just so they could lie about their capacities.

I don't know what input any hard drive manufacturers who had members in these organizations might have had might have had, but the binary prefixes (kibi/gibi/tebi/etc.) were developed by the IEC with support from the IEEE and CIPM (International Committee for Weights and Measures) due to concerns that the old "everybody knows kilo- means 1024 in the context of computers" attitude was proving problematic as computers became a more and more generally-used tool.

It's actually meant to SOLVE the problem you're complaining about... though more in the context of standards, research, and business. (People in related but different fields both saying 5GB but meaning different things)

When I studied, 1GB meant 1073741824 bytes.

...because people in computer science decided "Ehh... 1000? 1024? Close enough. Use the SI prefixes."

Personally, I think it'd make more sense to complain about wood measurements like 2x4 referring to the size they're cut before the wood is dried out.

The problem is that the number of people who do not comply with the standard is larger than the people who do.

The situation is way more confusing now than it was before the standards bodies got involved. Because now you buy a 2TB HDD, and don't (apparently) get anywhere near that much free space when Windows tells you your drives capacity. I wonder how many calls HDD manufacturers get per day because of that issue alone.

due to concerns that the old "everybody knows kilo- means 1024 in the context of computers" attitude was proving problematic as computers became a more and more generally-used tool.

This is total bull$hit. There is almost no situation where knowing the number of bytes in a MB/GB is required in order to successfully use a computer.

People simply understood that they were copying 5MB, and the computer says they had 6MB free. No problems. In fact that's still how it works because Windows still uses the old definition of a GB.

Standards bodies, I think, overstepped their bounds. While they are responsible for setting standards, they should have sought the opinion of the major stakeholders before making the change they did. And if it transpired they could not at least get a majority YES vote, then it should not have happened.

" The "xiB" nomenclature was invented by HDD manufacturers just so they could lie about their capacities.

I don't know what input any hard drive manufacturers who had members in these organizations might have had might have had, but the binary prefixes (kibi/gibi/tebi/etc.) were developed by the IEC with support from the IEEE and CIPM (International Committee for Weights and Measures) due to concerns that the old "everybody knows kilo- means 1024 in the context of computers" attitude was proving problematic as computers became a more and more generally-used tool.

It's actually meant to SOLVE the problem you're complaining about... though more in the context of standards, research, and business. (People in related but different fields both saying 5GB but meaning different things)

When I studied, 1GB meant 1073741824 bytes.

...because people in computer science decided "Ehh... 1000? 1024? Close enough. Use the SI prefixes."
"

Personally the whole XiB vs XB nomenclature is just confusing, and doesn't resolve the issue at all. Rather is just makes you have to pay attention to the fine print or lack thereof.

And yes, 1GB ought to simply mean its historical definition of 1024MB or 1024*1024 KB or 1024*1024*1024 bytes.

Simply put - it was for a long time evident that in communications the numbers were base-10 - 1000 bytes = 1 kB, and in computers the numbers were base-2 - 1024 bytes = 1KB. Adoption of the HDD manufacturers using the communications variant is what setup the whole mess, and the supposed solution doesn't resolve anything, just makes it worse especially as the computer definition - which all programmers are use to, and the vast majority programs are written to display - was redefined to the silly XiB nomenclature.